Mr. James Conyers took his breakfast in his own apartment upon the morning after his visit to Doncaster, and Stephen Hargraves waited upon him; carrying him a basin of muddy coffee, and enduring his ill-humour with the long-suffering which seemed peculiar to this hump-backed, low-voiced stable-helper.
The trainer rejected the coffee, and called for a pipe, and lay smoking half the summer morning, with the scent of the roses and honeysuckle floating into his close chamber, and the July sunshine glorifying the sham roses and blue lilies that twisted themselves in floricultural monstrosity about the cheap paper on the walls.
The "Softy" cleaned his master's boots, set them in the sunshine to air, washed the breakfast-things, swept the door-step, and then seated himself upon it to ruminate, with his elbows on his knees and his hands twisted in his coarse red hair. The silence of the summer atmosphere was only broken by the drowsy hum of the insects in the wood, and the occasional dropping of some early-blighted leaf.
Mr. Conyers's temper had been in no manner improved by his night's dissipation in the town of Doncaster. Heaven knows what entertainment he had found in those lonely streets, that grass-grown market-place and tenantless stalls, or that dreary and hermetically-sealed building, which looks like a prison on three sides and a chapel on the fourth, and which, during the September meeting, bursts suddenly into life and light with huge posters flaring against its gaunt walls, and a bright blue-ink announcement of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Mathews, or Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kean, for five nights only. Normal amusement in the town of Doncaster between these two oases in the year's dreary circle, the spring and autumn meetings, there is none. But of abnormal and special entertainment there may be much; only known to such men as Mr. James Conyers, to whom the most sinuous alley is a pleasant road, so long as it leads, directly or indirectly, to the betting-man's god—Money.
However this might be, Mr. Conyers bore upon him all the symptoms of having, as the popular phrase has it, made a night of it. His eyes were dim and glassy; his tongue hot and furred, and uncomfortably large for his parched mouth; his hand so shaky that the operation which he performed with a razor before his looking-glass was a toss-up between suicide and shaving. His heavy head seemed to have been transformed into a leaden box full of buzzing noises; and after getting half through his toilet he gave it up for a bad job, and threw himself upon the bed he had just left, a victim to that biliary derangement which inevitably follows an injudicious admixture of alcoholic and malt liquors.
"A tumbler of Hochheimer," he muttered, "or even the third-rate Chablis they give one at a table-d'hôte, would freshen me up a little; but there's nothing to be had in this abominable place except brandy-and-water."
He called to the "Softy," and ordered him to mix a tumbler of the last-named beverage, cold and weak.
Mr. Conyers drained the cool and lucid draught, and flung himself back upon the pillow with a sigh of relief. He knew that he would be thirsty again in five or ten minutes, and that the respite was a brief one; but still it was a respite.
"Have they come home?" he asked.
"Who?"